My dad is a rock.  He is solid, he is powerful.  He can still pick me up and toss me over his shoulder.  He is never seen to cry, he can never be swayed or damaged by opinion.  He is a real estate agent, and he pushes those deals and sways those clients with confidence and experience.  He flexes his arms at the dinner table when I ask him and points exactly which way it is to the beach or the gun show.  He is a tree, a mountain, a thick and formidable presence in any room, in any place, against any person.

“He’s late,” my mom said, and pursed her lips through the steam of her hot dinner plate.

My brother pushed a floret of broccoli with his fork.  “Can’t we just start without him?”

“Absolutely not.”  She frowned.  “God help us if we become one of those families that never eats together.  It’s an important part of your childhood, and so many of your friends just eat in front of the TV, don’t they?  My family never got to eat together, and I always wanted nothing more than just have one night when—”

Dad burst through the door and stopped for a moment, taken aback that we were all there, all waiting.  All listening to mom tell the same damn story that we’d all heard a thousand times.  All thankful to the heavens that he had intervened.

“I had a doctor’s appointment,” he said, hurrying to the table and dropping his briefcase and coat by the door.  “I’m sorry, honey, I forgot to tell you, and traffic was horrible.”  She watched him, lips pressed together.  “Um…  This smells amazing, honey.  Can we start?”

She muttered something about working so hard to put together a dinner on the table, but dad had started tearing into his steak.

“This is delicious,” he said through a mouthful, his voice stained with food and apology, and a bit of juice dribbled down his cheek.  I wrinkled my nose at the sight of chewed meat and the dry taste of my tofu burger.

“Thank you,” mom said.  She wasn’t having steak either.  Some new weight-loss plan.  “How was your day?”

“Oh, it was fine until that appointment.”  He stuffed in a bite of mashed potatoes.  “Doc says I’m overweight.  He wants me to shed more than a few pounds.  As usual.  Named off some diet.”

“Cutting out the brutally slaughtered cows might help,” I muttered, but if he heard, he didn’t say anything.

A light came on in my mother’s eye.  “A diet?  What did he recommend?”

“Uh…”  He took another bite.  “North Park…. North Beach… No, that’s not it…”

“South Beach!  Oh, I did that one!”  She leaned forward in her seat over a small pile of seared vegetables.  “I have the book upstairs.  Oh, you’ll like it so much, I promise.  It’s fantastic.  It’s written by a doctor and he’s actually been on this diet and it’s been proven to work…”  That was where I tune out and focus on the strange aftertaste of my not-so-beef burger.  My opinion of food is that we should only worry about it when it’s being genetically engineered for maximum flavor or raised in the squalor of dark warehouses.  Life is far too short to worry about how many calories are in a Wheat Thin.

But from what I heard later, it seemed that life was far too short to not worry about those kinds of things.



I could hear them talking, still at the dinner table, as I started up the stairs.  I stopped and pressed myself against the banister, naturally inquisitive.

“We’ll start you tomorrow,” my mom said, and I heard pages turning.  “Let’s see, Day One, Phase One.  For breakfast, you’ll have… a piece of whole grain toast with low fat butter.  Don’t worry, I have some of that.  It comes in this bottle and it’s spray-on.”

“Spray-on butter?  That’s just wrong.  I can’t make it through a day with just that for breakfast.”

“No, you also get to have one cup of V8 vegetable juice.  It’s quite filling.”

“Coffee?”

“No, that’s no good for you.”

“Jesus—”

“Oh hush, you get a snack before lunch.”

“Thank God.”

“One low-fat mozzarella stick.”

There was a slam of palms on the table.  “I am not going to do this,” he said, and the legs of his chair scooted out on the hardwood.

“Cam!  Sit down.  This is important.”

My dad is a bear, and the only thing that can control him is my mother.  There was a creak as he sat back down.

“Your doctor has said the same thing to you every time you go.  Did they run that test this time, on your arteries?”

My dad is a great and silent boulder when she says things like this.

“Yes,” he said finally.  Their voices had assumed a hush, and I leaned in as far as I dared.

“And what did they say?”

He sighed like wind leaving the mountains.  “More clogging, the same thing they always say.”

“And how many years did he give you?”  My mom used to be a teacher.  She says that repetition helps us remember.

“Twelve.  Twelve years until some kind of heart attack if I keep eating like I do.”

I could almost hear my mom close her eyes.  “I want to grow old with you, sweetie.  I don’t want to have to lose you early.”  Their voices were barely breaths now.  “Just do this for me, won’t you?”

I heard the slide of skin on skin as he touched her hand.  “What’s for lunch?”


The next night, my mom called all of the kids together before dad got home.  We sat at the table, leaning together.  Our family always felt so strange without him there.  Ungrounded, unstable.  When I was young, I thought that those thick poles strung with power lines were there to keep the wires from floating off into the sky.  I didn’t find out until later that the whole things would fall apart without them.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a twenty dollar bill.  It was like turning on a switch, and we all gravitated towards her.

“How would you all like to be spies?” she asked, smoothing out one edge.

“Yes, please,” said my brother.  He was saving up his money for some new video game.  The other one stretched out a hand towards it, but she pulled it away.

“This is for whoever is the first to find your father eating something unhealthy.  Sneaking a bite of cake, stealing a cookie, it doesn’t matter how small.  You catch him, you get this.  No questions asked.”

I swallowed, very much intrigued.  My car was thirsty and had quite a tank of gas to keep filled.  Even with those damn gas prices that mounted with each hour, that clean twenty would go a long way.



My dad is an elephant, and from that night on, he had three small scientists watching his every sway, his every step.  It was dangerous work, but it had to be done.  Dangerous because no man worth his salt can live off granola and mozzarella sticks without some irritability.  Dangerous because coming home to a pack of children that run out when he gets not to greet him but to search his car for McDonald’s cups can be discouraging.  Dangerous because a man can get snappish after watching his eleven year old son gnaw on a steak while he himself plods through a salad.  Dangerous because there is something distressing to a man when his wife and children beg not for stories but for him to map out every bite of food that he ate that day.  But from what we saw, he was true to his food and true to his promise to my mother.  He wasn’t happy about it, but he was losing that weight like he promised.

Of course, we weren’t about to trust him.  Oh no.  Spies don’t do that.  There’s a lot of things that spies do do, but trust isn’t one of them.  Things had gotten to extremes.  If I suspected him stealing bites of cake, I would take a picture of it before I went to bed and compare it to the cake the next night.  No change.  My brothers would count the cookies in bags, take inventories of the freezer.  We’d leave chocolates and candy out on the counter as bait, hurrying down the next day to see if anything had changed.  No such luck.  The twenty was beginning to get comfortable in my mom’s wallet.  He was either very determined or very good at hiding.

It turned out to be the latter.


It was another three weeks before I caught him.  I had woken up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and hadn’t been able to recapture sleep, so I stumbled down the stairs.

He was there at the kitchen table, seated before a formidable bowl of chocolate ice cream.  Bingo.

Our eyes stuck together when he spotted me, and I stopped there for a long moment, just watching.

“What are you doing up?” he said, wiping his mouth.

I blink the sleep out of my eyes.  “Couldn’t sleep.  How’s the ice cream?”

“Good.”

“Didn’t know that one is allowed in Phase 1.”

“You’re worse than your mother.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re going to tell her, aren’t you?”

“She offered me twenty bucks.”

He scowled and took another bite.  “I knew it.”

“Sorry dad, just being a good American.”

“Oh, come sit down, capitalist.”  I slid into the seat next to him.  “I don’t do it often, honestly.  Just sometimes I can’t help it.  Once in a while isn’t a big deal.”

“Still makes me twenty bucks, buddy.”

We were quiet for a moment, and he stared down into his bowl.

For the first time, I saw wrinkles in his eyes.  Suddenly, his fine blond hair that he had passed on to me had patches of grey in it, and his skin sagged at his cheeks.

My father is a castle with cracks in the turrets and moss in the cracks.

I almost cried, then.  There is something staggering about realizing that your parents weather like rocks.  It’s that feeling.  When you look back at pictures when you were a baby and see you parents and God do they look old, when you catch them in a light and see the shadows dig into the wrinkles of their faces, when you see your friends’ parents and they’re about the same age and they look kind of ancient and you think that yours are younger, but you go home and see them and your mom is putting extra cover up on her cheeks to bring back the youth and your dad’s neck wrinkles out from the collar of his business suits and you think to yourself, God, they are old, and your English teacher tells you the next day that it’s expected that you one day bury your parents and you sit there and stop listening to her talk about an essay due Monday wonder when One Day is.  I almost cried.  Sometimes, there is something awful about realizing the truth.

I looked at him, and he looked back at me with my eyes.  I leaned over and pulled a spoon from a drawer.

“Here’s the deal,” I said.  “You share this stuff, and I’ll keep this quiet.  But you have to promise that this won’t happen often, and when it does, you’ll share with me.”

He swallowed a bite and a smile.  “I suppose that will work.  But only if you let me pick the flavor.”

“Deal.”  We shook on it, and the calluses on his fingers were rough and real.

We ate the rest in silence, only breathing out laughter as we fenced with our spoons for the last little bit.  The ice cream crouched cold in my stomach and ached at the core of my teeth, and I leaned back.

“You’re lucky you’ve got me here to save you from yourself,” I said.

“Hey, you’re a teenage girl,” he said, picking on my stereotype.  I glared at him, but I don’t think it was effective, due largely in part to the smear of chocolate on my bottom lip.  “Aren’t you scared of calories or something?  You should be thanking me.”

“I’m only scared of calories if they were mercilessly killed or farmed in warehouses,” I replied.

He smiled.  “You’re odd.”

“I have to get it from somewhere.”


My dad is a rock.  And that night, along with many others, I was a rock too, and we sat there in the dark of the night with ice cream or cookies melting into our stomachs.  We all need our reprieve, we all need our moment of weakness.  I kept it quiet, kept it silent.  That’s what spies do.  I never did get that twenty, but neither did my brothers.  I think my mom ended up spending it on another diet book, which significantly less useful and exciting than a full tank of gas.  That’s all right, though.  Most times after my dad and I had shared a late night piece of pie, I’d find that the little arrow on my dashboard had bounced right away from Empty to Full.